ENGLISH AND GENDER

The English language doesn’t have gender, so you’ve been told. Well, that’s not exactly true. Nouns borrowed from other languages, such as the French “fiancé”/”fiancée” use the French gender endings to refer to a male/female engaged to be married. We’ve also created some nouns using the feminine ending “ess” to distinguish between an actor/actress, steward/stewardess, and don’t forget the plain old “man” ending such as “fireman” “policeman” and such – however, these distinctions are being replaced by gender-neutral terms – not because our language evolved that way, but by policy to avoid bias now that we’ve decided to recognize the ability to work in the professions of 51% of the English speaking population heretofore ignored. And there are other gender indications as well.

But what we really mean when we say English doesn’t have gender, is that there aren’t inflections throughout the language to give words a gender characteristic - for instance, in gendered languages the gender given to nouns that refer to things can be quite arbitrary, like French for “beard”, “la barbe” being feminine, and bed, “le lit” being masculine.

English does have what one of my linguistic books calls “biological gender” – in that it has personal pronouns that are specifically used to refer to the actual sex of the person or animal being discussed. They exist only in the third person singular only: “he” and “she,” and “it” for when referring to inanimate objects that have no sex. In the third person plural, They simply covers everything. The lack of a third person singular neuter pronoun that can be used in English to cover whether what’s being referred applies to a man as well as a woman is the source of the ubiquitous so-called singular/plural disagreement grammar error. We don’t want to assume everyone is a he, but we like the way general philosophical statements sound in the singular better than the plural. It seems more eloquent to say i.e.

A person should always think before he acts

Rather than,

People should always think before they act.

But when you agree noun and pronoun correctly in the singulr, you end up using the “universal he.” So students will write,

A person should always think before they act.

Or, writers start using she alternating with he, or awkward  but inclusive forms like” he/she,” “he or she,” “she or he,” and “she/he.” But you pay the price for inclusiveness when you write an inelegant expression such as “A person should always think before he or she acts.” People have even tried to promote a new word to take the role of inclusive singular pronoun, one of whom was “hesh.” “A person should always think before hesh acts.”

There are lots of ways to fix this, other than using the plural. For instance, you can use a gerund:

A person should always think before acting.

Other sentences will suggest other solutions.

But it’s possible that grammatical ire (almost nothing pisses people off as much as grammar errors) over the use of the plural pronoun is based on just another example of a grammarian being in a snit and deciding to change English “for the better.”

A column in The New York Time’s called “All Purpose Pronoun” puts it this way:

This will surprise a few purists, but for centuries the universal pronoun was they. Writers as far back as Chaucer used it for singular and plural, masculine and feminine. Nobody seemed to mind that they, them and their were officially plural. As Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage explains, writers were comfortable using they with an indefinite pronoun like everybody because it suggested a sexless plural.

This actually make a lot of sense, because if “a person” can either be a man or a woman, then that’s two possible cases, which seems to argue for the plural “they.” But it’s never going to sound as eloquent as the first example. If “they” had been accepted for hundreds of years, though, then why did we end up using “he” as the universal default gender? Did society at some point take a turn to an even more patriarchal culture? Not in this case. Apparently, the first man to advocate for the “universal he” was a woman:

If any single person is responsible for this male-centric usage, it’s Anne Fisher, an 18th-century British schoolmistress and the first woman to write an English grammar book, according to the sociohistorical linguist Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade. Fisher’s popular guide, “A New Grammar” (1745), ran to more than 30 editions, making it one of the most successful grammars of its time. More important, it’s believed to be the first to say that the pronoun he should apply to both sexes.

Another example that when it comes to gender, English is a tough language to figure out, and has a strange history of  native speakers bypassing language evolution and  trying to make the native tongue “more better” with usually poor results.